Notes and Essays -- John Brown

Russia hoped winter would bring Ukraine to its knees. Here’s why it didn’t. By Max Boot, The Washington Post ,  Today ,  March 30, 2026 at 6:00 a.m. EDT A heavy strike drone of the 422nd Unmanned Systems Regiment of the Ukrainian army flies with an attached air bomb over a training ground, in Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region, on March 23. (Stringer/Reuters)  KYIV — When I first visited Kyiv in May 2023, Ukraine’s capital experienced what was then one of the largest air attacks of the war: Russia fired 25 missiles and nine drones. I could hear the blasts outside my hotel room as Ukrainian air defenses shot down all the projectiles. Last week, during my third visit to wartime Ukraine, Russia set another shameful record by firing 30 missiles and nearly 1,000 Shahed drones during a 24-hour period (March 23-24).  The radical expansion in the size of air attacks over the past three years is a sign that Russia’s war of aggression shows no sign of abating. But Ukraine, while fa...

Inside one Kyiv neighborhood as it braved the harshest conditions since World War II.   Svitlana, a 66-year-old resident of one of Kyiv’s Soviet-designed apartment blocks, at the entrance to her building in early February.   Image: Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times  By  C.J. Chivers   , The New York Times , March 30, 2026 C.J. Chivers worked in Kyiv, Ukraine, in January and February to report this article.   In Troieshchyna, a residential neighborhood at Kyiv’s northeastern edge, the slide into darkness and cold began during a single night early this year. For much of the war, Russia had been targeting the energy infrastructure in Ukraine’s capital. But after each strike, fires were doused, debris was cleaned up and power and heat were mostly restored. That changed overnight on Jan. 8, when explosions thundered across the city and the descent into sustained, frigid misery began.   In original article: "Listen to this article, read by Ro...